


drag your cities to the sea

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Selkies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 20:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17567300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The boy who came from the sea had washed up on the shore three months earlier, after a storm. He was found curled like a shell’s whorl, naked and confused, salt-glistened like mother-of-pearl. He was sand-filmed, like how oysters turn discomfort into beauty. And he had the darkest, saddest eyes anyone had ever seen.





	drag your cities to the sea

_Varadero, 1846._

 

Lance returns to the city he was born in the year he turns twenty-five. He returns in the last slow bleed of summer, the sticky heat unraveling into golden autumn; he returns unemployed, unmarried, a boy made into a man. Made of airs and graces, the other locals say, and words can’t be turned into bread. There is no alchemy this century. They’re not quite sure what he worked as, over there in Havana, the sun its own kind of pulse. They say he was a _lectore_ , that all those years of curiosity wound him up like a ticking clock, left him only able to unspool out - his voice raised like a choirboy, echoing out over the factory rows of cigar-rollers like communion. _Lectores_ make good money: he always sent good money home. The explanation fits like a new glove, in the same way he doesn’t fit in Varadero any more.

They say there was a woman - that maybe she died, or left him, two ways of saying some kind of exit. There might have been another man involved. All of it might be a story, designed to stir up the local girls so they can sigh when he walks past. He picks up his old work at the family’s restaurant. In any other place, any other version of Varadero, he might have been the most gossiped-about resident. He’s not. He’s overshadowed by the boy who came from the sea.

 _No,_ the girls correct when their grandmothers talk about him, _no, he’s not a boy. He’s just young. He’s of marrying age still._

 _And he’s still a boy to me,_ their grandmothers insist, _for all he’s of marrying age. It’s his eyes that are fooling you into thinking he’s older than he is._

_It’s just he’s seen loss, and a lot of it._

 

*

 

The boy who came from the sea had washed up on the shore three months earlier, after a storm. He was found curled like a shell’s whorl, naked and confused, salt-glistened like mother-of-pearl. He was sand-filmed, like how oysters turn discomfort into beauty. And he had the darkest, saddest eyes anyone had ever seen.  

It took him a week to talk. When they asked his Christian name, he blinked those huge, grief-stricken eyes and finally said, “Keith,” and though he said it like a question, voice gone rusty, they took it as an answer.

After all, they had seen his kind before. In a town sealed in by the sea, they knew what to do when men staggered out of that same sea, blinking, as though the salt had washed every last memory clean out of their souls. Sailors hit their heads on debris all the time, swathed in the waters of sinking ships, surrounded by their dying friends - and if they came out of it alive, they came out of it understandably changed.

And so they did what they could. They gave him clean clothes. The Fuentes, after all, had a boy who had outgrown his old shirts and gone to the capital. He was their youngest, so they were going spare, only waiting for the moths. They sat oddly on Keith’s frame: the Fuentes boy had been as tall, but with reed-slender shoulders. Keith was heavier, sleeker, muscled. If he’d heard the women giggling and trying to peek through the door as he changed, he’d not said a word. The chair he had pushed up under the door handle said enough.   

They ignored - politely - how he ate with his bare hands, how he tore into the fish they put in front of him like he was starving, only to pull away and blink at the taste.

“Do you not like pepper?” the eldest Cuesta sister had asked. She elbowed her cousin in the ribs. “I told you not to put too much -”

Keith had carefully put down the fish, sucking on his fingers, and shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he’d said, which had made them all laugh. What kind of grown man doesn’t know what he likes and what he doesn’t?

They figured he’d come from some foreign place, from the slow way he responded to their words, frowning, like someone wrestling each syllable into sense. It explained how the coins handed to him after he did odd jobs for the townsfolk confused him, how he had to be shown how to buy bread. And they figured it must be colder wherever he came from, because he never truly seemed to feel it when the weather dipped, wandering around in shirts poorly buttoned, forgetting overcoats, going barefoot as a child along the rocks.

And there was the last part, the part that was not so strange to the town: he did what many sailors before him had done, which was stare out endlessly at the sea, silently, the longing in his look stretched out like an unclasped hand. It was a gaze that begged for mercy, or salvation, or maybe it was forgiveness: either way, Keith never attended the local church, and he never looked to try and take a wife. The first part wasn’t a great surprise to anyone. The sea had made atheists out of God-fearing men before him, just as it had baptised evangelicals. But he showed such little interest in the women who showed up on his doorstep, hands busy with gifts of stew, beribboned in their Sunday best: at most, they got a low, murmured thanks and the door shut in their faces. It was a shame, because he was an odd one, but he had a good face and seemed kind enough.

Months passed. He settled into the landscape. He still ate with his hands, picking the bones clean, still forgot to wear shoes. And then Lance, freshly thrown out of his factory job, blue-eyed and broken-hearted, came home to his family’s house.

 

*

 

“So,” Lance says, when the door finally opens, “You’re the one who stole all my old shirts.”

He’s proud of this line. He’s been rehearsing it all the way up the hill, struggling towards the cliff-house Keith had taken over for himself, a basket of fresh bread and preserves from his mother heavy as a damn baby on Lance’s hip. It’d been abandoned for over ten years, since the last sailor had built it, become the local celebrity-slash-charity-case and disappeared, all in the space of a summer. Lance had been twelve years old.

 

(He knows now what no one had wanted to tell him then: that men who have seen too much death in the sea sometimes go back there, are lured back out to the fate they missed. That the last sailor to live in this house before Keith had walked out into the sea one midsummer night, silvered in moonlight, put his head under and just -

His body never washed ashore, not this second time. His clothes had been left, folded neatly on a nearby rock. There was a memorial to him in the local churchyard, though the sailor hadn’t been the church-going kind. Children still leave shells on it. Lance never quite dropped the habit either.)

 

But Lance isn’t twelve years old anymore, he’s twenty-five and too old to be running errands for the local eccentric. The only reason he’s out here is because of his mother, who had had a lot to say about her son not wanting to help out their neighbours, _what kind of Christian boy did I raise you to be again, young man -_

 

( _A bad one,_ Lance had thought, but had rolled his eyes and taken the basket. She’s halfway right. He’s not got anything better to be getting on with. After all, there’s still no letter from Havana.)

 

So anyway, he’s here now, he’s gotten Keith to open the door, and Keith is blinking at him, eyebrows drawn downwards. And damn. Keith, on first glance, is far too pretty for his own good. All the angels and all the saints conspired on this one, all high bones and big eyes. He almost regrets his scathing opener. Almost. Keith doesn’t give him enough time to really settle into that feeling, because:

“So,” Keith replies, “You’re the reason the shirts don’t fit right.” His gaze sweeps over Lance in one long, devastating lick, and then he turns his back.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Lance stammers, wrong-footed. Damn. No one had warned him this Keith was _rude as shit._

“I left the door open,” Keith points out. Lance shoulders his way into the house, which is a -

It’s a sad excuse for a house, really: all one room, with a brushed dirt floor and a couple of hand-woven rag-rugs cast about the place. A wide straw pallet for a bed, and an open hearth in the centre. A table worn down smooth, scarred by years of hot iron pots and idle knives. Lance puts the basket down there. Minus the weight of it, he stretches his arms over his head. He isn’t sure why he’s making no move to leave: perhaps it’s the way Keith has slunk into the corner of the house, chin raised stubbornly, eyes flashing. It puts him in mind of a small, defensive animal.

There are dried herbs hanging above the hearth, and a single tin teapot, battered like a knight’s armour. _I should maybe say something_ , Lance thinks.

“It’s not very -”

“Exciting?” Keith interrupts him, leaving no breath of space for Lance to concur, “I agree. Please tell all the women in Varadero that exact thought. Perhaps then they will stop trying to visit.”

“I don’t...think that’s all they’re curious about.”

Keith is making slow, cautious moves over to the table, pausing and looking at Lance until Lance clues in and makes some kind of impatient _go on then_ gesture. Why so timid? Keith looks like he could break both of Lance's arms in a fair fight; the cloth of Lance's old shirt strains over his shoulders as Keith begins to rummage through the basket. He smiles, briefly, shockingly, the slice of it like striking lightning, and turns to Lance.

“Your mother’s Elena Fuentes. She makes good bread.”

“The best.” Damn, why is Lance agreeing with him?

“Your mother gave me the shirts, you know.” Keith tells him suddenly, as though he’s been turning Lance’s first comment over in his head, “I didn’t just - I didn’t ask. She said you weren’t going to have need of them. Said you were in -”

“Havana, yes, I was,” Lance snaps. It’s still a sore subject. “And now I am clearly not.”

“Are you asking for them back?” Keith reaches long, pale fingers to his own collar, his nails glinting as he starts to push buttons through their holes.

“No!” Keith freezes, eyebrows raised. Lance swallows down the peculiar high pitch of his own voice and continues, “No. No, I don’t - it’s not - look, I wasn’t asking for them back, alright? It’s not like they fit me anymore, anyway."

He’s wearing the shirt Lance was given on his twentieth birthday, Lance realises faintly, blinking at the now-faded pinstripe cotton. Keith’s head is tilted to one side, considering.

“Oh, I see,” Keith says, finally, “You were trying to make me uncomfortable.”

“Yes,” Lance mutters, “Yes, I was.”

“It doesn’t properly work if I don’t understand it.”

“Thank you. Yes. That’s - that has been noted.”

Keith just nods, still gazing at him with those huge eyes. It’s more than a little unnerving, like - like he knows, or something, and the thought of that makes the tiny house contract around them in pulses, like Lance’s own heartbeat. Time to go.

 

(Maybe by the time he gets back to the house, there’ll be a letter from Havana. The boss said that when it was all cleared up, he’d write Lance. Maybe it’s been fixed.)

 

“I’ll tell her you like it,” Lance says, turning blindly on his heel to go.

“What should I call you?” Keith’s voice stops him dead. “I’m to call you something, I assume.”

“Elena Fuentes’ son is fine.” Christ, he can hear Keith’s frown, and he’s known the man all of ten minutes. “I - it’s - it’s hardly -”

“She called you Lance. Was that right?”  

“Leandro,” Lance immediately corrects, practically snaps it out like bringing down a carving knife. Lance is the name his friends call him. It’s not a name Keith has any part in. “It’s Leandro.”

Keith seems to have enough sense still in him to drop it. Lance makes it nearly to the door before he speaks again.

“Leandro -” and here Lance feels a hand close around his wrist. He seizes up on instinct, just for a beat, and then turns to glare at Keith. He assumes it’s glaring, at least. His whole awareness is narrowing to a pinpoint, to where one of Keith’s nails digs slightly into the skin of his inner wrist. Keith’s eyes fall to Lance’s other hand. Lance hasn’t even noticed it’s clenched into a fist until Keith lets go of his hold on Lance.

“I was going to say -”

“Go on,” Lance says, forcing himself to relax.

Keith holds up one of the jars of preserves in his other hand. The glass shines in the light coming through from the half-open door.

“This one,” he says, hesitant, eyes tracking Lance’s face. “I like this one a lot. Please tell her.”

“Wonderful,” Lance manages, “I’ll tell her,” and makes it halfway down the hill before he has to stop for breath, salt air stinging at his eyes.

He has the definite feeling Keith is watching him flee like this, but when he turns, the door is resolutely shut.

 _It’s not -_ Lance tells himself. _He wasn’t - he doesn’t know. It’s not something he would know. That was all - he doesn’t know._

“He likes the orange one best,” he tells his mother when he gets back to the house, even though he isn’t sure how he remembered that detail in the midst of everything else.

Four days pass.

 

(There is no letter from Havana.)


End file.
